---

---

I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in April of 2026, where I worked primarily in the philosophy of language. My dissertation, Meaning Without Assertion: Metaphor, Seeing-As, and Linguistic Responsibility in Deniable Speech, develops a unified account of figurative and deniable communication that I call the Aspectual Construal View.

The view begins from a puzzle. Our public and private lives are saturated with speech that communicates powerfully without literally asserting what it means. When a politician frames immigration as a “flood,” or a poet writes that “Juliet is the sun,” something rich is communicated — but no proposition has been asserted. How does such indirect communication generate shared meaning, and on what grounds can we hold speakers accountable for content they never literally said?

I argue that the primary communicative weight of a metaphor is not a hidden proposition but an aspectual construal reorientation: an invitation to use a source characterization as a governing frame through which to restructure one’s understanding of a target subject. This reorganizes the hearer’s salience network, licenses open-ended inferences, and generates affective evaluations, all without asserting any of them. Because aspectual content is an experiential perspective rather than a truth-apt proposition, I argue that the correct evaluative norm for metaphor is not truth but aptness. I extend this framework to a broader taxonomy of deniable speech acts, including dogwhistles and paralipsis, and develop the Responsibility for Available Content principle: speakers are accountable for the aspectual frames they foreseeably make available to a competent audience, regardless of their private intentions or literal semantic content.

My dissertation was supervised by Josh Dever, with Mark Sainsbury, Kathleen Higgins, David Sosa, and David Hills (Stanford) serving on my committee.